Windows Update takes forever

[stuck]

For info only...

My little Netbook that runs Win 7 Starter has failed to update itself for the second month in a row. Google searching points to either the need for the WU client to be updated or WU trying to smuggle Win 10 pre-installation files down the tubes.

If the former then that seems like a Catch 22, since WU never finishes checking for updates (yes, I have left it overnight) so I can't get any WU client updates.

If the latter then although I've never seen any sort of Win 10 nag on it, I suspect the problem is that the poor little Atom CPU with only 1 Gb RAM isn't man enough cope with Windows Update shoving Gigabytes of Win 10 pre-installation files down the tube to it. Having said that I can't find any hidden folders on it that indicate such pre-installation files have been/are being downloaded so maybe that's not the problem.

Either way and as the Netbook holds no data that's not backed up on an external HDD and I only really use for surfing the web from my sofa, I'm going to 'fix' the problem by resetting it to factory defaults and see how it gets on updating from a clean slate.

I'll report back after the weekend.

Ken

[HansV]

Good luck - I hope that'll work (there'll be even more updates to install after resetting the netbook...)

[stuck]

...there'll be even more updates to install after resetting the netbook...

A couple of hundred I think but the reset will also clear out stuff that's been installed & uninstalled etc over the (nearly) three years I've had this little toy so it should clear out quite a few cobwebs as well.

Don't worry I won't be sitting over it while it chugs away. I'll set it going on Sat. morning and then go outside and mess around in the garden, just popping back every now and then to see what it's up to.

Ken

[jonwallace]

I'll set it going on Sat. morning and then go outside and mess around in the garden, just popping back every now and then to see what it's up to.

After 2 hours in the garden you'll return to a "press any key to continue" screen. It's inevitable.

I have a "surfing" netbook as well, but it started life as a chromebook, so I zapped chrome and installed linux (LXLE - mainly because it was the first lightweight distro I tried that supported the touchpad out of the box) and libreoffice. 10 minutes once a week to run updates is all the maintenance I do on it.

[stuck]

An update on this update thing...

I didn't get round to running the factory reset that weekend (long story) but I did do it this weekend. The reset was painless and the tidying up of the unwanted junk (using Revo) that was restored was tedious but also went without incident.

Last night I got round to running Windows Update for the first time. I expected it to tell me it had to update the Update client, do that restart and then search for the inevitable loooong list of updates. It didn't, it just sat there with the 'checking for updates' progress bar going back and forth. I left it. When I looked in on it this morning it said there were no updates available (huh?)

I shut it down at that point and it promptly started to install updates (huh? again). I had time to restart it before I went out to work. As I left it said "installing update 18 of 132"

I'll report back in due course.

Ken

[John Gray]

My argument for the need for "superfast" or fibre broadband is that it is necessary only to make Windows Updates download faster...

[DaveA]

If you had NOT gone in and changed the settings from Auto install, then when the machine is started it will check and start downloading. Then you come along and do a manual check so now there are two sessions running. The manual found none as the first had them all indexed.

Yes, with two sessions running it will take a very long time.

[stuck]

If you had NOT gone in and changed the settings from Auto install

Turning off Automatic updating was one of the first things I did and before I connected it to my home network, so that I would have full control of what was downloaded and when but is it possible to start manually start two update sessions? If so, then perhaps that's what happened.

As I said in my original post though, the reason I decided on a factory reset was because Widows Update had stopped working altogether and prior to it failing completely it had become very slow.

Ken

[DaveA]

The only time that it has been slow for me is when the auto has kicked in and I then do a manual check for updates.

Some times some of the updates will change the settings back to auto and that just may be what happened before you did the restore to factory settings.

[stuck]

One more thing on this reset and reinstall all the updates...

The reset cleared out some leftover widows update files, folders in C:\ with long random strings of letters as names that I'd discovered could only be deleted with the aid of Unlocker. As yet they've not returned but apart from the initial update catch up I don't think I've tried to run WU since the reset.

Any way, when I came to restore some of my pictures from my ext. HDD I noticed a similar left over WU folder in the root of the ext HDD. Presumably I had run WU at some point while the HDD was connected and WU had decided to use the ext HDD (more space?) as a dumping ground. I removed it with the aid of Unlocker but I wonder now if this folder was part of the reason WU was failing. Perhaps WU needed to refer back to this folder for some reason but because it was on the ext HDD and that wasn't connected it just hung.

Who knows and I don't care but I will be careful in future to ensure that my ext HDD is never connected when I do a WU.

Ken